Recovering Rational Science

The last seven decades ofthe twentieth century will be characterized in history
as the dark ages of theoretical physics.” With these opening words of
his MIT monograph Collective Electrodynamics, California Institute
of Technology professor Carver Mead throws down the gauntlet to loyalists of
the Copenhagen School of quantum physics of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.
Mead, as one of the late twentieth century’s leading experimental physicists,
bids to revitalize theoretical physics for the twenty-first century while incidentally
purging it of the “formalism” and “irrationalism” of
the Copenhagen School.

Sir Joseph John Thomson cracked open the door to the subatomic world when
he discovered the electron in 1897, but this realm lacked a distinct name until
after Max Planck reported in 1900 that, at the atomic level, matter heated until
it glowed radiated energy in steps instead of continuously along a smooth curve
as expected. He called the smallest step the quantum of energy, and
because this constant proved to be so significant, the term quantum
came to be applied to subatomic or quantum physics.

But it was not until the 1910s that the young Danish physicist Niels Bohr brilliantly
used Planck’s quantum of energy in working out the “ladder”
of energy levels of the one negatively charged electron that balances the positively
charged proton of the hydrogen atom. He found that whole-number multiples of
the quantum of energy matched the different energy levels of the electron in
the hydrogen atom. When an electron fell to a lower energy level, the atom radiated
a whole number of energy quanta as light, and when an atom absorbed a certain
number of light quanta, an electron would jump to a higher level.

This stepped transfer of energy, along with the paradoxical results of experiments
in which light and electrons sometimes did and sometimes did not form wave interference
patterns, made it appear that light itself, as well as the electrons, sometimes
acted like waves and sometimes like particles.1 In 1925 a young German
associate of Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, worked out a statistical equation that
predicted the wavelengths of the radiation from the atoms of different elements
as they are observed in the light from the sun and stars. Using the quantum
of energy, Heisenberg developed another equation that represented the limitation
of precision (uncertainty) in simultaneously determining the momentum and the
location of an electron.

Had Bohr and Heisenberg rested on these and their many other laurels, their
legacy would not be so sharply challenged by scientists such as Mead today.
But Bohr and the likeminded scientists associated with his lab in Copenhagen
declared that the search for an understanding of the nature of matter had come
to its limit with the observations suggesting that both light and matter (e.g.,
electrons) sometimes acted like waves and sometimes like particles. Bohr said
that these two contradictory views of light and matter were complementary rather
than mutually exclusive. He speculated that, at the atomic level, matter doesn’t
have a definite existence as either a wave or a particle, but has only an Aristotelian
potential existence. Heisenberg promoted his uncertainty equation into the Uncertainty
Principle and denied not only the possibility of knowing the path of an electron
between observations of it, but even that it had a definite path to know. In
Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science,2 he frankly
admitted that the logical law of noncontradiction had to be set aside in his
statistical account of atomic entities.

The Triumph of the Copenhagen School

Albert Einstein challenged Heisenberg and Bohr’s interpretation as failing
to provide a description of what happens to the atoms and electrons, but Bohr
twice defeated Einstein in the eyes of the leading physicists of the era in
public debate. Since then, Bohr’s Copenhagen School has dominated atomic
physics. But with the dawn of the twenty-first century, Mead has renewed Einstein’s
challenge, citing extensive experimental evidence of the exclusively wave nature
of matter. Mead’s simple but revolutionary idea is that matter is not
made of particles at all; it is entirely made of waves. This means that, contra
Bohr, quantum physical reality is not an unintelligible contradiction but has
a perfectly logical structure. As Einstein put it, “The Lord is subtle,
but he is not malicious.”

Mead contends that Bohr’s contradictory, statistical approach to quantum
physics arose from (1) his failure to break completely with a Newtonian
model of the atom as a nucleus surrounded by point-particles like planets circling
the sun, and (2) the crudity of the experimental apparatus available in the
1920s. Bohr clung to point-particles by introducing the contradictory duality
of the Principle of Complementarity: The parts of the atom had to be viewed
as both particles and waves and, hence, as neither one nor the other. Nevertheless,
Bohr and Heisenberg’s statistical approach was effective enough to make
many important predictions, and these successes helped make the Copenhagen interpretation
of quantum physics plausible despite its abandonment of basic logic.

Even granting that cloud chambers, an apparatus used to observe the track
of charged particles, are a relatively crude device, Mead may be unduly charitable
in citing the experimental apparatus of the day as mitigating Bohr and Heisenberg’s
quantum misinterpretations. Even cloud-chamber evidence suggests that an electron
has a definite and continuous path in spacetime. Indeed, the direction of the
curved path of the electron in an electric field depends on the strength and
polarity of the field and can be predicted. In the face of this kind of evidence,
Heisenberg nevertheless declared that his Uncertainty Principle meant that an
electron doesn’t have a continuous path. In Physics and Beyond: Encounters
and Conversations,3 Heisenberg writes of cloud-chamber observations that
“perhaps what we really observed was something much less [than the path
of an electron]. Perhaps we merely saw a series of discrete and ill-defined
spots through which the electron had passed.” This seems to be a classic
example of imposing a preconceived hypothesis on the recalcitrant observations.

Buoyed by their successes in predicting the spectra of radiation from hydrogen
and other atoms, then, the Copenhagen scientists came to believe that their
“mathematical formalism” defined both the ultimate nature of matter
and the limits of knowledge about it (its epistemology). Bohr’s skills
as a debater in his two encounters with the skeptical Einstein in 1927 and 1933
further strengthened the claim that microscopic realities could only be described
by mathematical probabilities. The 1932 award of the Nobel Prize in physics
to Heisenberg for the “creation of quantum mechanics” added yet
more momentum. Thus, the Copenhagen School succeeded in imposing its new orthodoxy
as the final form of atomic physics.

In Physics and Philosophy, Heisenberg describes his initial revulsion
against accepting the contradictory wave-particle duality. After one late-night
discussion with Bohr that “ended almost in despair,” he tells of
how “I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly
be as absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?” (p. 42).
But instead of questioning the contradictory wave-particle duality or at least
suspending judgment on it, Heisenberg questioned—and finally abandoned—the
rationality of nature. By contrast, early modern scientists had confidently
affirmed the rationality of nature because they believed nature to be the work
of a rational Creator. But later scientists, lacking the compass of revelation,
quickly lost their way in the dark woods of the microcosm.

Bohr and Heisenberg both had a philosophical turn of mind and were not content
with their dominant position as pioneers in quantum physics, the new frontier
of science. They imposed a new paradigm on science itself. For over 300 years,
mathematics had been fruitfully used to quantify, elucidate, and refute models
that represented the underlying physical reality. But the Copenhagen School’s
insistence on the wave-particle duality (complementarity) and on the discontinuity
of the path of an electron (uncertainty) rendered a physical model of what their
statistical equations described impossible. Instead of recognizing the situation
to be anomalous and temporary, they codified it as the final, definitive state
of physics. Since their equations did make useful predictions about quantum
phenomena, the Copenhagen School and many other scientists succumbed to the
temptation of total mathematical abstraction from physical reality.

The physical model became superfluous. All that remained were the equations,
which somehow yielded useful predictions but provided no clue to the nature
of the underlying physical realities. Karl Popper cogently challenged this “instrumentalism,”
as he called it,4 but Copenhagen’s instrumentalist definition of science
now may be even more firmly entrenched than Copenhagen’s quantum physics
itself. Although the Einstein-Bohr debates became snarled with side issues,
the central issue was whether or not science was obliged to describe the physical
realities underlying the equations: Einstein insisted that it must; Bohr claimed
that it was no longer possible.

Waves of Matter

Thus, Bohr led a rush to judgment by the Copenhagen physicists that fixed
theoretical physics in a kind of mathematical-statistical limbo for the rest
of the century. For Carver Mead, the result was a physics bereft of an intelligible
concept of fundamental physical reality. But on the basis of the insights gained
from his own experimental work with quantum phenomena, such as electron tunneling
and superconducting loops, Mead has cut the Gordianknot of quantum complementarity.
He claims that atoms, with their neutrons, protons, and electrons, are not particles
at all but pure waves of matter. Mead cites as the gross evidence of
the exclusively wave nature of both light and matter the discovery between 1933
and 1996 of ten examples of pure wave phenomena, including the ubiquitous laser
of CD players, the self-propagating electrical currents of superconductors,
and the Bose-Einstein condensate of atoms.

In the laser, for example, the peaks and valleys of the light waves are all
perfectly aligned (in phase or coherent), emphasizing their wave nature.
Similarly, in superconductors, the electrons of the current all take on the
same phase so that they move in unison. And the Bose-Einstein condensate is
a state of matter in which all the atoms act as one because all of the individual
wave-atoms are likewise in phase or coherent. Thus, when the matter waves of
electrons or of atoms are in phase, they display the same perfect alignment
or coherence as the light waves of a laser.

The wave nature of electrons explains their stepped or quantum transfers of
energy (that so puzzled Planck and others at the beginning of the twentieth
century), because this is normal behavior for transfer of energy by standing
waves. And the famous paradoxes of the absence or presence of interference patterns
of light quanta and of electrons confronted with one or two holes in their paths
are also explicable in terms of Mead’s view of these energy transfers
as instantaneous energy interactions between radiating and absorbing atoms.

If, as the examples of pure wave action suggest, light, electrical current,
and matter are all fundamentally wave phenomena associated with the electrical
charges of atoms, they can all be described by the equations of electromagnetism.
Indeed, Mead’s goal in Collective Electrodynamics is not to debunk
Copenhagen, but to unify quantum mechanics and electromagnetism without using
either Copenhagen’s statistical equation for quantum mechanics or Maxwell’s
equations for electromagnetism.

In Part 1 of his monograph, Mead considers the current in a superconductor,
which reveals collective electron behavior, that is, the way in-phase electron
waves link up. Such pure wave action is absent in ordinary conductors because
they are dominated by the interference of many electron waves of different frequencies
and phases. Thus, the basic division of matter is not the Copenhagen division
between large objects in classical physics and little objects in quantum physics,
but that between out-of-phase or interfering waves of matter (classical) and
in-phase or coherent waves (quantum). And Heisenberg’s uncertainty equation
is valid, but mainly as a measure of the uncertainty of location inherent in
the natural tendency of waves to spread out if not confined.

Einstein’s Vindication

So, in the light of the advances in experimental physics over the last 70
years, Mead seeks at last to definitively vindicate Einstein’s insistence
contra Bohr that “He doesn’t roll dice” (understood
not as a theological statement but as an affirmation of the “rigorous
causality” that Heisenberg explicitly denied). Mead’s work also
vindicates theologian-philosopher R. C. Sproul, who, in his 1994 book, Not
a Chance,5 criticized scientists who failed to conform to the basic presupposition
of rationality, the law of noncontradiction. Boldly affirming on logical grounds
that “a quantum leap is an illusion” (p. 47), Sproul predicted that
scientists would eventually find a reasonable explanation for the behavior of
electrons.

Mead fulfills Sproul’s prediction in Part 5 of his monograph by mathematically
tracing “the continuous trajectory of the state of two radiatively coupled
atoms through . . . a ‘quantum jump’” (p. 109). That is, contrary
to the claims of some Copenhagen physicists that electrons do impossible things
such as move instantly from one place to another without traversing the intervening
space, electrons act as stepped but continuous wave functions and behave themselves
with perfect intelligibility. And Mead shows all this without resorting to a
statistical treatment. Thus, in place of Copenhagen’s discontinuous, indeterminate,
and unintelligible physics, Mead offers a continuous, determinate, and rational
discipline.

In his epilogue, Mead acknowledges his predecessors: “Following the tradition
of Einstein and Schrödinger, the pioneers in this new endeavor, Jaynes,
Cramer, Zeh and others, have given us a great foundation . . . [and] have put
us in a position to finally settle the Einstein-Bohr debate—with a resounding
victory for Einstein” (p. 127). Their work and their critiques of the
Copenhagen School’s ideas helped Mead grasp the continuous nature of quantum
jumps. But Mead’s main positive contribution is to show how to unify quantum
mechanics and electromagnetism by the most appropriate of the basic equations
of electromagnetism.

Philosophical Implications

Although Mead’s equations are continuous and determinate, they need
not be interpreted as affirming a determinism that rules out free will. Karl
Popper’s devastating critique of inductivism and positivism holds that
scientific theories can never be “proven,” “verified,”
or “established,” but must always remain tentative. Hence, they
are never strong enough to support the kind of determinism Laplace tried to
impose on the basis of Newtonian physics. Popper specifically rejects a physical
determinism of thought and action.6 Nevertheless, he also rejects with
asperity the indeterminist physics of Heisenberg7 that makes quantum
physical reality unknowable.

Bohr’s famous dictum that “A great truth is a truth of which the
contrary is also a truth” betrays the irrational turn of mind that tarnished
his brilliance as a scientist.8 Indeed, in their haste to appropriate
the paradoxes of quantum physics for philosophical speculation and in their
retreat from reality into an instrumental definition of science, Bohr and Heisenberg
undermined the rationality of science itself. The unfortunate cultural consequences
of Copenhagen’s irrationalism include the use of quantum physics as a
basis for post-modernism in philosophy, and cultural studies as a basis for
apologetics for oriental religions, such as Fritjoff Capra’s The Tao
of Physics.9

Conversely, the return to reason of a hard science such as physics militates
against the attacks on rationality by oriental religionists, New Agers, postmodernists,
and cultural constructionists. This reemergence of a rational physics tends
to support the biblical revelation of the Creator as rational (the Word or Logos
of God), but we must remember that basing theology on empirical science is always
a mistake.

Despite its mathematical rigor, professional apologists, philosophers, and
Christian faculty in the sciences may want a copy of this breakthrough book
heralding the end of Zen physics for its brief but incisive verbal critique
of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. Mead, of course, could
be wrong on many points of his argument unifying quantum physics and electromagnetism.
He may even be wrong in his claim that matter is a purely wave phenomenon. (Mead’s
is not the only alternative to Copenhagen that preserves the rationality of
quantum reality.) But Copenhagen can’t possibly be right in its claim
that quantum reality is irrational—or science as a rational discipline
ends right there.

Since physics seems to be headed for a major self-correction, Christians in
science and theology should inform themselves and their communities of this
salutary revolt against irrationalism in physics by secular scientists. Those
theologians heavily invested in arguments for free will based on twentieth-century
quantum mechanics are likely to be disappointed by this news, but the demise
of Newtonian physics at the beginning of the twentieth century was fair warning
against basing theology on the shifting sands of empirical science. Nevertheless,
this news of the reopening of a science to reason shows that God’s common
grace is not absent from the world of science.

Notes:

1. For a resolution of the apparent wave-particle behavior of light quanta
and certain electrons, see physicist John Gribben’s engaging Schrödinger’s
Kittens and the Search for Reality (New York: Little Brown and Co., 1995).

2. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962, p. 181.

3. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971, p. 78.

4. In Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge
(New York: Basic Books, Inc., 2d ed.), Popper wrote that Bohr’s “so
called principle of complementarity . . . amounted to a ‘renunciation’
of the attempt to interpret atomic theory as a description of anything. . .
. Thus the instrumentalist philosophy was used here ad hoc in order
to provide an escape for the theory from certain contradictions by which it
was threatened.” Popper continues: “The instrumentalist view asserts
that theories are nothing but instruments, while the Galilean view
was that they are not only instruments but also—and mainly—descriptions
of the world” (pp. 100–101, italics in the original). For Popper,
the issue was nothing less than the survival of our scientific and philosophical
heritage from the Greeks of “the tradition of critical discussion—not
for its own sake, but in the interests of the search for truth” (p. 101).

8. In writing about Bohr’s radical view of philosophical language as
ambiguous, Paul Dirac cites Bohr’s own illustration: “‘There
is a God’ [is] a statement of great wisdom and truth, and the converse
‘There is no God’ [is] also a statement of great wisdom and truth”
(Niels Bohr: His Life and Work as Seen by His Friends and Colleagues, [Amsterdam:
North Holland Publishing Co., 1968], p. 309).

9. Kopel, Dave, “Uncertain Uncertainty: Postmodernism Unravels,”
National Review Online, April 4, 2002, 8:30 a.m. Kopel traces some
roots of postmodernism to the Copenhagen School but has noproblem with Copenhagen’s
Zen connection. Indeed, some eminent mathematicians and physicists such as John
von Neumann and David Bohm have believed Copenhagen’s most extreme claim,
that the consciousness of the observer affects quantum processes. But even many
Copenhagen loyalists have abandoned this claim, and John Gribben, again in Schrödinger’s
Kitten, op. cit., shows how the details of the instrumentation of the experiments
and not the presence of a conscious observer affected the processes.

David Haddon is an author from Redding, California, who
has written for InterVarsity Press and Baker Book House and whose articles have
appeared in Christianity Today, National Review, and Learning.
He holds a BS in engineering from the University of California at Berkeley
and an MA in politics and literature from the University of Dallas. A shorter
version of this review first appeared in the Spring 2002 issue of SCP Newsletter,
Berkeley, California, an Evangelical apologetics publication.

David Haddon is an author from Redding, California, who has written for InterVarsity Press and Baker Book House and whose articles have appeared in Christianity Today, National Review, and Learning. He holds a B.S. in engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.A. in politics and literature from the University of Dallas.

“Recovering Rational Science” first appeared in the September 2003 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

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